PBlaze5 900 Series is designed for mission critical enterprise applications, with enterprise-level JEDEC load life up to 3 DWPD for 5 years. PBlaze5 900 Series supports NVMe end-to-end data protection standard, with SBER < 1E-23, which helps prevent data conflicts and other issues caused by silent bit errors.

Kingston Digital, which is the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company has announced a new range of memory products for data centres.

Dubbed the Data Center 400 (DC400) SSD it is the latest drive is pitched at the entry-level for server use in data centers which use a rip-and-replace strategy. Kingston says that the drive is designed for read-intensive applications such as boot, web servers and lower data rate operational databases and analytics.

“DC400 SSD’s combination of high IOPS, low latency and advanced data protection gives server IT managers and decision makers the perfect front-loading server storage option that they can deploy with confidence,” Hollingsbee said.

DC400 SSD is available in 400GB, 480GB, 800GB and 960GB capacities2. The 400GB and 800GB capacities are performance optimized with greater IOPs for faster application performance and reduced storage latency. No mention of price yet.

During Samsung’s 2016 SSD Forum in Japan, the company unveiled some new top-tier successors to its 2014 flagship XP941 and 2015 flagship SM951 for OEMs and system designers.

The new NVMe-based M.2 line of PCI-Express SSDs, using 3D V-NAND and a new Samsung controller, promise increases in sequential read performance between 3000 and 3,200MB/s and significantly boosted random write performance up to 480K IOPS, and are expected to ship inside PCs during the second half of 2016.

The Samsung SM961 and Samsung PM961 are the company’s first drives to use its new Polaris platform, based on M.2-2280 form factor with a PCI-E 3.0 x4 interface and the NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) protocol. It’s anyone’s guess why the South Korean company chose the name “Polaris” for its controller technology during the same year that AMD is releasing a new high-performance GPU architecture based on the same name, but thus far the company has not revealed too many details except for surface-level specifications, namely the NAND technology it is using, read and write performance, and capacity sizes.

Image source: PC Watch

The SM961 will become Samsung’s top-tier M.2 SSD for OEMs and system builders and will come in sizes of 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and a new option of 1TB. It is based on the company’s 2-bit per cell 3D V-NAND MLC flash technology and will be capable of up to 3,200MB/s sequential reads and 1,800MB/s sequential writes, random reads up to 450,000 IOPS and random writes up to 400,000 IOPS. Samsung has not specified which models will be able to achieve these speeds, but we are looking at up to 49 percent more sequential read performance and up to 16 percent more sequential write performance than the SM951 512GB from 2015 based on Samsung’s UBX controller.

As AnandTech notes, the SM961's 3,200MB/s sequential read speed gets closer to the theoretical maximum of PCI-Express 3.0 using 4 channels (~3.94GB/s, after factoring in overhead). Four PCI-E lanes are the maximum allowed by the M.2 SSD standard, meaning performance limitations for OEM M.2 drives are once again going to be reached in a matter of time in much the same way they were reached for SATA interface standards. Eventually, the M.2 standard will adopt PCI-Express 4.0, which doubles the bandwidth from PCI-Express 3.0 and is expected to be finalized sometime next year.

Image source: PC Watch

On the other hand, the PM961 will become a slightly more affordable M.2 NVMe SSD for OEMs and system builders, replacing last year’s PM951 and will be replacing traditional TLC NAND flash with 3-bit per cell 3D V-NAND TLC. The drive is also based on the new Polaris controller and will be capable of up to 3,000MB/s sequential reads and 1,150MB/s sequential writes, random reads up to 360,000 IOPS and random writes up to 280,000 IOPS. This translates to almost three times more sequential read performance and almost double sequential write performance over the PM951 512GB from last year.

The company's SM961 and PM961 should become available to OEMs and system builders beginning in the second half of 2016.

Samsung's 2016 SSD Forum in Japan (via PC Watch)

Samsung PM963, up to 7.68TB in a 2.5-inch Enterprise NVMe SSD

Image source: PC Watch

During the 2016 SSD Forum in Japan, the company is also introducing the PM963, a successor to the enterprise 2.5-inch NVMe-based PM953 PCI-E 3.0 x4 SSD announced back in August 2015 that topped out at 1.92TB. The new PM963 now adds two new storage sizes at 3.84TB and 7.68TB respectively. The drive will use Samsung’s 3D V-NAND on a 3-bit MLC process and will feature sequential reads up to 1,600MB/s, sequential writes up to 1,200MB/s, random reads up to 380,000 IOPS and random writes up to 35,000 IOPS. These drives are expected to be used in high-performance scalable computing applications with support for Samsung’s reference NVMe JBOF architecture. An example was demonstrated last year with 24 Samsung PM953 SSDs bearing 184TB of storage and delivering up to 5 million IOPS of throughput. As for the new PM963, the company has yet to announce pricing or a launch date.

OCZ has finally released its newest Vector Series of solid state drives, based on Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller, rather than the now standard Sandforce controller.

Available in 128, 256 and 512GB capacities and standard 2.5-inch, 7mm ultra-slim form factor, the new Vector SSD Series uses the Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller paired up with MLC NAND chips and SATA 6Gbps interface. OCZ decided that the new Vector Series is quite good enough to be called "a groundbreaker" in performance, reliability, efficiency and endurance.

With up to 95k IOPS in random 4k read and up to 100k IOPS in random 4k write it certainly has enough punch to be quite a performance groundbreaker. The 128GB version can deliver 550MB/s sequential read and 400MB/s sequential write performance, as well as 90k IOPS of 4k random write and 95k of 4k random read performance.

The 256GB and 512GB versions both feature the same 550MB/s of sequential read and up to 530MB/s of sequential write performance with aforementioned 100k/95k IOPS random write and read performance.

The new Vector Series SSDs also come with TRIM and Idle Time Garbage Collection performance optimizations and are bundled with Acronis cloning software registration key and 3.5-inch desktop adapter.

Although the official price has not been announced a quick check at our favorite price search engine shows that it sells for around €150 for the 128GB one, around €270 for the 256GB version and around €500 for the 512GB version. In case you are coming from the USA, Newegg.com currently lists it at US $159.99, $289.99 and $569.99 with free shipping for all three models.

All we need now are some reviews to see how well does it actually perform against the Sandforce-based competition.

Western Digital, one of the world's largest hard drive manufacturers based out of Southern California, has taken the position that the ultrabook form factor will not boost the popularity or sales of Solid State Disks (SSDs), regardless of Intel's "high performance, low power consumption" strategy.

The 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas had two major trends this year - ultrabooks and Smart HDTVs. Intel's $300 million ultrabook funding program, initiated in August 2011, had finally come to bear fruit on the market as we saw multiple PC vendors pushing out ultra-sleek, ultra-lightweight designs based on Intel 32nm and 22nm processor models, the majority of which are sporting solid state disks.

Nevertheless, WD CEO John Coyne expects to see a world where traditional hard drives and hybrid drives continue holding significant marketshare in the mobile industry. "I expect ultrabooks to have traditional hard drives, hybrid hard drives and SSDs. [...] We think that the SSD penetration profile will be in very low single digits in a mature ultrabook environment. We see an emerging position for hybrids a little early to develop a view on exactly what percentage of penetration, but we see hybrids as a very compelling alternative on the performance side to solid-state on bang for the buck. We anticipate that in large capacity environments, traditional hard drives will continue to be the compelling solution," said John Coyne, chief executive officer of WD, during the most-recent conference call with financial analysts.

The global HDD supply chain has been facing severe shortages in recent months due to natural flooding disasters in Thailand, where the majority of manufacturing operations are held by multiple companies. Western Digital said on Monday that it was continuing to ramp up HDD production and had resumed manufacturing "sliders" - a critical component of HDD assembly where the drive's headers are mounted for read / write operations. Previously, slider operations had been suspended since October 10, 2011.

The Southern California-based company expects its operations will be at 60-percent capacity during Q1 2012 and should fully resume back to normal (58 million drives per quarter) during Q3 2012. Furthermore, the company expects its suppliers should be back to pre-flood operations by Q2 2012.